h0l

The House of Leet

I met Dave Terrell on Usenet - he was posting to some local newsgroups that I frequented, and I started talking with him. Somewhere within a few days, or weeks, or whatever, we met in real life; according to Dave, we were introduced by Drake Depew, an old high school buddy (who later married my senior prom date's roommate; that's another story). And then, some time later, he invited me to live with him for the summer. Without too much consideration, I agreed.

The h0l (house of 'leet, for those that really care - nobody actually calls it that anymore) is/was located at 608 W Elm in Urbana, IL. It's an old house that was converted to student living long ago; it obviously used to be a wonderful place to live, but now it's in horrid shape thanks to having huge piles of students (and near-students) living in it for so long... It's got a fireplace, eight bedrooms and two bathrooms, a large kitchen, a good sized dining room and living room, and a dark scary basement. Back when I knew it, it also had 768k business-class DSL network connection, 10/100Mbps ethernet through the house, and enough technical expertise to make it a really nice network. It was the geekiest house on campus, except perhaps for HoF (I'm not translating that one) which had a few students cluster admins...

And all this for just $450 the summer!

I was hooked. Sure, I was coming in knowing just two of my roommates (Rene and Dave), but the other guys were said to be friendly, and I didn't know yet about some of the little things - like the basement, with its Room of Broken Glass. Or how hot an un-air-conditioned place can get, especially when you're on the third floor. Or how dirty the place gets because nobody cares to clean it.

But nicely, I didn't care all that much about this stuff, even while I was living there for the summer of '97.

So the summer went. I pulled myself out of a grade slump (summer semesters are *great* for that!), and talked with all of the various people that lived there. We watched lots of cable and movies, ate fairly well, had a lot of barbeques, spent too much money, and spent our time grumbling about our jobs (or lack thereof). It was a good summer, with lots of friends and plenty to do. It was kindof sad to move out again at the end of the summer, though I was going back to Allen...

And so I decided to live there again the next summer.

The next summer was a bit more difficult - there was more in-fighting, and the residents were a bit less social than before. I got the same price as before only through bargaining between roommates that hated each other (Dave Stott and Dave Terrell), and Rene was a bit more distant for the time... Of course, it was another good excuse to get my grades up, and so I did - and this was aided by my TV being downstairs this time.

There had been talk of me staying that next year; that fell through, though, because of my vow to never live with a couple (Rene and Dave got together just as I was about to sign the lease; they broke up later on, and Dave even moved away, but it was too late). Instead, I lived with Caitte and James in BASL, which worked fine. But I sitll spent a lot of time there - many of my friends (Ray, Erik, Rene, Moshen, and Rachel) lived there that next year, and I had essentially become a secondary resident in terms of how everyone treated me (which mostly applied to their parties...).

The h0l finally disbanded after the 2000-2001 school year. I didn't really know anyone there very well after that, so it wasn't a great loss. Now, though, it's controlled by Christians, but is otherwise fairly normal... They didn't even clean out the basement.

Other points that I couldn't really fit in: